the cold light of day
by stanzaic
Summary: An explanation as to why Ward was in Vault D and not A, B, or C. Fourshot; warning inside. M to be safe.
1. a

**THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY**

* * *

A/N: I love Ward so very much. And once I thought of the angst possibilities, they couldn't be squashed. It helps that the show is so awful to him, the poor guy. Also, it pisses me off that they just left him there after suicide attempts, not to mention now keep telling him he should die. Anyways, I wrote this all at once quite early in the morning; I forgot how much I love writing angst.

WARNING: This is extremely dark. There are mentions of death, self-harm, and suicide. There is also a lot of swearing.

* * *

 _VAULT A_

* * *

The first time he woke up he thought he was dreaming.

It wouldn't have been the first time. He had a lot of nightmares and all of them were weird as hell—like his life on acid or something. Garrett would be there, and so would Christian and their parents, and they'd all laugh while Thomas drowned him or choked him or smothered him or did something else that kept him from breathing.

So when he woke up, gasping for air, he was certain it was a nightmare. But as Agent Grant Ward sat up and turned to look around he saw that it wasn't a nightmare: this was life. He slowly rotated to put his feet on the ground and looked down, checking his condition. His foot was burning and he was sore all over and he could've sworn those were broken ribs—plus when he felt his face, there was some swelling, and he could feel stitches—but what concerned him the most was his throat. It just—it felt wrong for some reason and he didn't know why—

Ward thrust himself to his feet and limped toward the wall opposite him. He was in a gray cell. When he stopped and tapped the wall, he discovered it was made of some kind of metal. Iron, probably. But when he turned to tap another wall, that sounded an awful lot more like glass. Ward scoffed softly to himself as he realized it was probably one of those damn two-way mirrors. Maybe the rest of the team would want to watch him dry up and wither away in here, like a science experiment.

He turned, leaning back against an iron wall, and slid down to the floor. Once there he pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his head between them. Ward's head was throbbing and he still really just didn't know about his throat—

"Hey, he's up."

Ward lifted his head and squinted toward the glass wall. It was light out there now; he didn't know how long he'd been sitting there. There were a couple of guys he vaguely recognized from SHIELD standing around outside. Both of them, he noted, looked absolutely disgusted. "Hey, asshole," said one of them. Ward just looked at him.

The guy glanced over at his buddy. His friend looked amused and Ward couldn't tell why. "You know, we're gonna be watching you," said the friend, taking a step toward the glass screen. "There's security cameras installed in there. You won't be going anywhere anytime soon, you fuckin' Nazi."

"I'm not—" Ward tried to say. Then he stopped, because as far as he could tell, nothing came out but some kind of rusty, hoarse noise, and it hurt his throat a lot. Both of the agents outside laughed. Ward reached up to feel his throat— _right_ , of _course_! May, goddamn May, fractured his larynx. Was that even a thing that healed? It could, right?

Ward wasn't sure if he'd need surgery for it to heal. If he did, he knew for certain it was never going to. None of these people would give him surgery. They'd all rather let him die instead—even Skye. Especially Skye.

He reached up to push his hand over his face, and then through his hair. Though it seemed they'd taken the liberty of cropping his hair close while they'd been doing whatever they'd been doing to him. "Poor baby," said one of the two guys. "Can't even talk back."

"Yeah, you're not such a big shot now, are you?" said the other one. "Now Garrett's dead and so are all your nasty little friends."

They're not my friends, Ward wanted to tell them. I'm not a Nazi. I was just following orders.

But then they'd say that was what a Nazi would say, and Ward almost believed it. Almost. It wasn't like he'd known what else to do—Garrett had showed up in that prison and offered him a way out, a way out that didn't include Christian or his parents or even remembering Tommy, so of course he'd decided to take it. He'd been introduced to SHIELD through HYDRA. It wasn't a betrayal—it was just business, it was who he worked for. Couldn't all of these people understand that?

It occurred to him that both of them had kept speaking. They were still laughing with each other and cajoling, but he didn't care. He just watched them, the venomous looks on their faces, the way they spit their words at him. Ward didn't even know who they were and they hated his guts.

He didn't know how time passed here. It all blended together. Sometimes those guys showed up to stare at him and mock, sometimes some other guys did too. He kept expecting to see one of his old teammates turn up but none of them ever did. Maybe it wasn't as long of a time spent in there as he thought—but it just…it felt like ages, and the longer it drew on, the more and more lost in his thoughts he became, and the more those guys and the other people visited the more he wondered…

Was he a Nazi?

No, no, no, he couldn't have been, he wasn't; Nazis slaughtered Jews, Nazis didn't carry out missions to take down corrupt organizations—but was SHIELD even corrupt? The concept almost made him laugh, of course SHIELD was corrupt, SHIELD was filled with HYDRA members trying to take it down and SHIELD had so many illegal bases it wasn't even funny, and he was probably in one—

Were they going to torture him or not? _Fuck_ , he wished they'd got on with it already, all this waiting, he just—he couldn't handle it, he couldn't take it. Waiting for his dad to come home and hit him, waiting for Christian to come around the corner and find him and Tommy, waiting for Garrett to come back to the woods because nonono he couldn't have left him, he wouldn't have left him waiting there, all alone—

SHIELD let him wait. Oh, God, did SHIELD let him wait. He'd been in this fucking organization for ages and how far had he gotten? He hadn't even known Coulson was alive until Coulson wanted him. Why hadn't Garrett even told him? Why hadn't he been more in contact with the rest of HYDRA? Ward didn't even know what HYDRA was—what even was SHIELD? What did they protect, who did they truly serve?

Ward didn't even know that about himself. The more he thought about it the more upset it made him. He tried not to think about it whenever people visited because he was determined, stupidly, not to let it show through, that they were breaking him without even having to say anything, without even having to drown him. They were breaking him because he couldn't even respond, and he was starting to think that was for a reason, that maybe God or whoever the hell was up there having a good laugh was forcing him to think about his responses—

He took a button from his first pair of pants. As the days drew on longer and the nightmares grew stronger—he wasn't even sure what was real and what wasn't at this point, for all he knew Skye _had_ come down here and screamed at him that he was a fucking murderer and that he deserved all this because God, he knew he did—he sat on his bed in the corner and calmly scratched the button against the wall. At first it was to count days because there was a skylight overhead, though there was no way he'd ever be able to reach it. Maybe it was because there were obvious tally marks on the wall they let him keep the thing.

But then as he wanted to say more, as he wanted to scream and just _couldn't_ , he started filing down the button. He could've swallowed it but he didn't want to go that way, couldn't go that way, it would've been like rewarding May for what she'd already done, sort of. Instead he just whittled the button down a little more, a little tiny bit more, until—

One day Ward sat there, leaned up against the wall, and fiddled with the button in his hand. He studied it, at the one rounded side and the flattened side, the sharp edge that he'd created. The glass wall was dark. Nobody was out there, and even if those guys did see him on the security cameras, he doubted they'd come down to help him.

Who was Grant Ward? Was he a Nazi? Was he a SHIELD agent? Was he some loner wolf who could do missions on his own, a murderer, a psycho, a sociopath? Was he the worst damnedest older brother the world had ever seen, the biggest disappointment to his parents and to God, the stupidest arsonist on the planet? Was he the kid who hopefully sat around in the woods and waited for a corrupt man to come back and save him again, the kid who started fights in juvie, the kid who refused to shoot the dog?

 _Who was Grant Ward?_ Was he the man he was with Skye or the man he was with May? Was he the man he was with Fitz or the man he was with Coulson? What about Simmons, even? He rubbed his hand over his face as he thought about it because he knew, he knew he'd blown that mission, oh God he knew, he knew he'd let them in and that was the last fucking thing an agent was ever supposed to do, he'd let his cover story get to him—

Had he become his cover story? What even was the cover? _Who the hell was Grant Ward!?_

Nothing made sense anymore and he couldn't even scream. So Grant Ward, whoever the fuck he was, very carefully, very calculatedly, lowered the sharp edge of the button to his wrist, and sliced it open. Then he watched as he bled out.

Maybe in hell he'd at least be able to scream.


	2. b

_VAULT B_

* * *

At least now he could talk.

"You've really got some guts, you know that?" Ward said conversationally one day, as he ate his meal and Morrison, that damned agent who always laughed at him, watched on the security camera. "You're an asshole and a half, Morrison," Ward said, turning to look straight at the camera. "And you come down here and tell me that I'm the jerk. I remember what you did to Sophia Waterson."

Being able to talk was either the worst or the best part of this new cell. All Ward knew was that after he'd passed out in the first one in a puddle of his own blood, he'd woken up and there hadn't even been a stain on the floor. Everything was arranged the same but there were no tally marks on the wall and there was no button on the back of his pants now. It felt like some kind of hospital getup.

Morrison was the easiest to rile up. He usually hurtled down here and opened the glass wall to yell obscenities at him. Ward always watched with little concern, because even though Morrison was spitting all over the glass and there was a little vein that always popped out in his forehead, at least Morrison was someone to talk to.

Speaking of—Morrison came storming down now at the mention of Sophia Waterson. The wall or whatever panel was on the other side slid upward and Ward smirked at the infuriated agent on the other side. "What the hell did you just say to me?" Morrison hissed.

"Sophia Waterson," said Ward. "You know, that girl you drugged. I wonder where she is now."

"Shut up!" Morrison shouted at him. "I didn't drug her!"

"Not what she said to me," Ward replied mildly. He took another bite. "You know, Morrison," said Ward with his mouth still full, "you SHIELD agents are all the same. You all say you're doing the right thing, but who the hell are you doing it for?"

Morrison glared at him. Ward looked back, hoping his cavalier attitude was pissing Morrison off. As far as he could tell it was working. The more he got Morrison mad, well—it was insurance that Morrison would keep coming down here to argue with him and tell him he was wrong. It was good to have somebody to say it to him, with no Christian or Garrett or Coulson or Skye, even, around to tell him. How else was he supposed to know?

Because, all right, and he knew this, he sort of understood it now—he had no idea who Grant Ward was. Who the hell was he? He was the result of Christian and Garrett and Coulson and Skye, that's who he was, he was some sick patchwork thing with no thoughts of his own. He did know, though, he knew that he couldn't be alone down here. He couldn't.

That episode with the button had scared him. It had terrified the hell out of him, even more than thinking about drowning or not being able to breathe. Because Ward had literally sat there, he had sat there and without even truly thinking about it, he had decided to commit himself to the end and send himself straight off to hell. He knew that was where he was going; there was no point in lying to himself about it. That was one other thing he knew, anyway.

Ward didn't know what to think about the whole thing. Sometimes he would lay there on his side and trace invisible lines along the wall, thinking about the race to mortality. They'd all wind up there in the end. People always used to tell him to compete, for better grades, for better marksmanship, for better missions, for better everything, but what nobody ever said was that the end of the race was the same for everyone no matter how good you did. The finish line was death, whatever that meant.

Sometimes he wondered if he did know what that meant. Ward had been in plenty of life-or-death situations, of course. Had he seen his life flash before his eyes? It hadn't been much, really; he'd dated a few girls and he'd gotten into a few fights and he'd been best friends with a few guys, and then there was everything else with Christian and Thomas and their parents and Garrett and Coulson and Skye, but it wasn't much. It was all a blur of fighting. Never fleeing, but it was still all just…fighting.

When he'd cut his wrist and sat there watching his blood drip onto the floor, listening to it softly drop onto the iron floor, maybe he'd flashed in and out. He didn't know. That had been—that had been weird. When he was younger and he was stuck with Christian and Thomas was dead, Ward knew he'd thought about it. Oh, he'd thought about it, all right. He'd even—and he'd never told anyone this because it was really scary and what was even scarier was that it felt more like a failure than anything—he'd even tried to overdose one time, before he'd burned his parents' house to the ground. But he'd woken up and nobody had even fucking noticed he'd tried.

Would Skye have noticed? He liked to think she would have. She was more observant than she gave herself credit for, but she was too emotional about it. She'd have been able to tell the truth if she could compartmentalize.

Is that was he did? Did Ward compartmentalize? Did he pack himself away so very well that he didn't even know what to do with himself anymore?

He mused over this for the long, long days he spent in that cell, his second cell. He didn't know how long it was. There was no way for him to keep a tally now. Ward did some workouts because there was nothing else to do, although it wasn't like he was ever getting out of here anyway, and he slept a lot because what the hell else would he do down here? Other than that he antagonized Morrison. Then he just sat there and thought.

Ward hated thinking. He hated thinking alone, sitting curled up in the corner, watching the daylight brighten and darken from the skylight overhead. He didn't ever know what he was thinking about, and sometimes he was thinking about the stitches in his wrist and sometimes he felt them and wondered if he could rip them out with his teeth. But he only really thought about that on bad days.

On most days Ward thought about Garrett and Christian and Coulson. What were they doing? Was Garrett rotting in hell? He knew Christian was probably out having the time of his life somewhere, the ass. He had no idea what Coulson was up to; he'd never really known that anyway. What he did want to know about Coulson was what death had been like. Had it been as sweet as Ward sometimes imagined it to be? Did Coulson go to hell and come back, or did he go to heaven, and did purgatory exist? Did God even exist, was there anything at all?

His life was full of questions now. All he could do was sit there and ponder them, just…waiting. He didn't know what he was waiting for. The thing was that if he wasn't waiting for something, what was he doing? What the fuck was the point?

Ward started to realize that he didn't want to know who Grant Ward was anymore. Grant Ward wanted to welcome death like an old friend; but he, no, he wanted to run from it, because Tommy and his parents would be there, not to mention Garrett and whoever else he'd offed in the past. Seeing all of them? Now that would be hell.

On one of these long days, just after Ward had finished with his pushups and was standing up, the glass wall opened up. "Finally come down to get your retribution, Morris…?" Ward started to ask as he turned around. But instead of Morrison, there stood someone Ward had somehow never expected to see.

Phil Coulson smiled politely at him. It was unnerving. "I bet you're wondering why we're keeping you here," said Coulson.

Ward clenched his hands into fists. The man's voice was physically abrasive, grating on him. He knew that voice so fucking well, he knew that was the voice of the man who had condemned him to this—this pathetic nonexistence, all those stupid-ass missions that did nothing for anyone. "I doubt you'll give me the answer," said Ward, at long last.

"No, I'll give it to you," said Coulson. He kept the same maddening expression of cool politeness with a hint of a smirk on the whole time. "You can give us the names of the rest of your friends."

"They're not my friends," said Ward at once.

"Your colleagues," said Coulson, not missing a beat.

Ward and Coulson stared at each other for a long moment. Ward wanted to scream at him, tell him that this was all his fault, that he'd been stuck here with only a total jackass for human company and he really just wanted to see some fucking trees, but Coulson would only half smile at him. He knew Coulson was probably happy about that. Maybe this was the form of torture instead of waterboarding. "What do I get?" said Ward.

Coulson gave a slight little laugh of disbelief. "You get to live."

Ward laughed back, his a sharper and bitterer sound. He lifted his wrist and stepped toward the glass, holding it up to show the stitches to Coulson. "You think that has any promise for me?" he snarled. Then he turned away, waving his hand and kind of laughing to himself. "There's nothing you can say to me that will make me give you that."

"I'd say if you don't cooperate, there'd be consequences," said Coulson breezily, "but we both know you're too well-trained for that." Ward threw his hands in the air—at least Coulson admitted that. "But I do have one last option."

Ward raised his eyes to the skylight overhead, squinting at the brightness. It was a sunny day outside. Wispy white clouds were passing rather quickly; it had to be a windy day. Ward idly wondered what month it was, what the season was, if it was a sultry summer day or an oddly warm autumn one. Maybe it was snowy out and he was looking at it all wrong.

Then he turned around, because Coulson was the only remotely close possibility to getting out and figuring out what the hell time of year it was. Maybe it would take years to get out of here but at least that'd be something. "What?" asked Ward, already skeptical.

"Skye," said Coulson.

Ward narrowed his eyes and turned his head a little, studying Coulson suspiciously. Of course the man's face gave nothing away. "What about her?" asked Ward slowly.

"I'll send her down to see you," Coulson replied.

They stared at each other for another very long moment. Coulson's face didn't change and none of his tells were showing up. Ward had to assume he was telling the truth. But—did Ward even want to see Skye anymore? He highly doubted she wanted to see him…

What if she did, and Coulson had told her no? Was that what had finally prompted Coulson to come to him?

It was this last stupid, _stupid_ shred of hope that he clung to. "Deal," said Ward.

So then his days changed, but only slightly; because on occasion Coulson came downstairs to retrieve more information on other HYDRA agents and bases. Skye never showed up and Ward was pretty sure his beard was going to grow to the floor before Coulson let Skye actually come down here to see him.

Just after the third visit from Coulson, Ward shot upright and took a step toward the glass, as Coulson started to walk away. "When the hell are you gonna let Skye down here?" Ward demanded. "I want to see her."

"I know," said Coulson, with that infuriating little smirk turning up the corner of his lips. "She won't be here until every last HYDRA agent is caught."

Ward pounded his fist against the glass. It didn't even shudder. "That wasn't the deal!" Ward yelled, punching it again for good measure.

"You don't get to set the terms, Ward," said Coulson, the disgust clear in his voice. It was even starting to show on his face, which was saying something—usually the man was an emotionless robot.

"I'm the one with the information," Ward snapped back. "I _should_ be setting the terms. You need me!"

Coulson gave him a withering look. "Do you have any other complaints?" he asked mockingly.

"Yes!" Ward shouted back. "I want to see some goddamn trees!"

"Well, how about this," said Coulson, taking a small step back toward the glass wall. "I'll send Morrison down with a paper for complaints. How about that?"

Then Coulson turned around and marched away, and the panel closed, leaving Ward alone in his dark little hellhole. Ward let out a yell of frustration and punched the glass a few more times before giving it up and wandering over to sit down on the edge of his bed. He just sat there, breathing hard, for a few minutes, as the anger and frustration seeped out of him.

God, he was tired. He was so tired. And speaking of God— _just take me now_. He wasn't going to see Skye. He was never going to see Skye again.

Ward slowly looked up at the skylight overhead, his one last piece of evidence that the rest of the world was still turning out there somewhere. Even when Morrison or Coulson didn't show up some days, Ward could look up, and he'd see gray clouds or a blue sky and he'd know that somewhere, someone was walking their dog, or someone was taking a walk, or someone was sitting in class or going to the movies or trying on a shirt at the mall, or someone was doing laundry in juvie or walking the streets homeless, or playing guitar for coins on a street corner or overseeing a group of businesses. Someone was out there somewhere, doing utterly normal things, which meant that Ward—Ward was normal, too, he was part of this world somehow.

Morrison really did come down with a piece of paper. He shoved it into Ward's cell through the slot food usually came through. "There you go," he said mockingly. "Good luck."

"No pen?" Ward called back, even as the panel slid shut over the glass. "What d'you think I am, magic?"

He heard a laugh and nothing else. Ward sat back, looking at the piece of paper, and suddenly crumpled it in his hand in a flash of rage. What the fuck was he supposed to do with this!? Ward turned and hurled it at the glass opposite him. Then he slid back over and leaned against the wall, curling up in the corner, because he didn't want Morrison to see on the cameras that he was crying.

After a long time, and no Skye, no nothing, and possibly some dozing off, Ward knew there was nothing else left for him. Even if he was part of this world, he was never going to see it again. He'd given Coulson enough information. He'd sold his soul enough times, to varying sides, and he was done with it, sick of it all. And honestly he was just…he was just so damn tired.

He wanted to be scared, he really did, but he just wasn't anymore. Ward climbed to his feet and walked over to where the crumpled up paper had landed. Then he sat down hard by the paper and picked it up. He meticulously unfolded it and then smoothed out the creases against the metal floor.

Then Ward stared at the paper for a long moment. He wondered if Morrison was watching this on the cameras. Just in case Morrison was, Ward flipped off the camera; then he hunched over the paper, blocking it from Morrison's view, and folded it carefully. It was sort of like folding all those stupid cranes everyone had been obsessed with making in middle school.

Ward folded that paper just right. Then he looked at the place where the stitches, which had since dissolved, used to be; then he put the paper into his left hand and considered his other wrist. Yes, he thought idly. This one would be better. If they decided to save him from this, he'd match.

And so Ward did his best to die. He cut open his other wrist after a few tries; then he laid down on the floor on his back, holding his arms out, and closed his eyes, perfectly in the rectangle of daylight coming down from above. It probably would've looked pretty symbolic and shit if he'd been Morrison.


	3. c

_VAULT C_

* * *

When Ward woke up, there was nothing but darkness.

Panic immediately started to claw up through him. Ward sat up and felt around—he found a wall, and he knew he was on the bed, but was there anything else? He managed to climb off his bed and he felt around the floor—couldn't feel any bloodstains, maybe this was a new cell—and then he felt along the walls. He knew one of them was glass.

He didn't know what to do about this. Ward figured it must have been nighttime. He squinted upward as his eyes started to adjust to the dark but couldn't make out any outlines of a window. He was really tired; maybe it'd make more sense later. It meant more waiting but Ward was really nervous about this and he didn't really care about the waiting so much anymore.

Ward walked back over and sat on his bed. He curled up in the corner and sat there, waiting, too full of nervous energy to go to sleep and too scared of this silent dark room to stay fully awake. He had to compromise by pushing himself up against the wall and waiting for day to come.

But day never came.

Maybe it was just a really long night, Ward reasoned, as the waiting stretched longer and longer. Maybe—maybe his new cell had a skylight under an emergency landing strip or something, and there was a shadow of a helicopter or a plane blocking the light. Maybe—maybe—he didn't know what, but there had to be some kind of reasonable explanation for this.

Ward had lost all concept of time, so he had no clue how long he waited for day to come. At long last, though, he could feel all the last vestiges of hope seeping out of him, and he curled into the wall and cried. Because he was never going to see trees again, probably never a human being because it wasn't even like he had a mirror in here, and he was never going to see the sky or Skye or clouds or rain or streetlamps or cobblestone streets again. He was…he might as well have been dead.

There had to be a security camera in here. Maybe they were all watching him together and laughing, Skye included. "Why didn't you let me die!?" Ward screamed, and his voice echoed, bouncing all around him. " _Why didn't you let me die!?_ "

He slid down further, a complete miserable mess, and tried not to have a panic attack. He used to get them a lot when Christian had been ordering him around and letting him take the punches. Most of the time he'd get them after the beating was over. That was what this felt like—taking the day from him? Taking the goddamn day? This was—it was a beating, it was the true torture in all of this. Because he might as well have been dead but he was still so fucking alive and _there was absolutely no reason_.

But Ward couldn't help it. He did have a panic attack, his breathing ragged and echoing monstrously around him, the air getting caught up in his lungs and all tangled up on its way in and out. He tried to think about something, anything, but when he used to have them Christian used to hold him until he shut up, and then Sarah Montgomery in high school used to hold him too, but that was just because he wanted her to. There was nobody to hold him here. He was alone, utterly alone, in this wide, wide world and he was stuck in the dark, literally blinded—

It all became a blur. Ward didn't know what was going on half of the time. His eyes kind of adjusted to all this darkness, but it was still hard not to stumble sometimes. He still kept working out, or trying to, because he had nothing else to do. He couldn't even sit and watch the sky anymore, couldn't even watch the daylight brighten and darken like he used to. And when he sat and thought for too long he'd start to panic again.

He did that a lot—had a lot of panic attacks. He had a lot of nightmares, too, and what was worse was that in his nightmares, he couldn't see anymore, either. It was always about drowning without being able to see, splashing around in a dark well like Tommy had—like Ward knew should have happened to him, not Tommy. Ward deserved it. Thomas hadn't.

Although Ward didn't work out enough for it, he started to feel sore a lot of the time. His joints ached like he was an old man and his muscles kept cramping out of seemingly nowhere. For all he knew, he thought bitterly sometimes, maybe he'd been in here so long that he _was_ an old man. But his beard wasn't to the floor yet so he couldn't have been that old.

The worst ache of them all was his head. Oh, did his head hurt. As the days, or whatever he was supposed to call them now, dragged on, the pounding in his head grew worse. Sometimes it was so bad that all he could do was curl up on the cold floor and wait until it passed. And sometimes he wondered if it had ever passed at all; maybe, for all of this time, he'd just been lying there, waiting in the dark, for the headache to go away.

Ward thought about killing himself a lot. He wanted to die. He didn't even pretend otherwise now. He was already accustomed to the empty blackness. He couldn't figure out how to do it though, and the horrible pain in his head combined with his automatic and total panic upon thinking about being alone in the dark too much made it hard to come up with something.

He wanted Morrison back. He wanted Coulson back, he wanted anyone at all. Just—if only he could just see a tiny bit of sky, just a little sliver of light blue somewhere overhead. If he could only see that, he'd be fine—he'd stay here in the dark for however long they wanted to keep him here, just as long as he knew that he wasn't already dead and that there were still people out there in this world somewhere, good people, civilians. People that went to homecoming dances and watched football games and bought nice things for each other and went to church and didn't know shit about all this messed up stuff.

Oh, God. He wished he didn't know. He wished he'd never known. Why the fuck had he said yes to Garrett? Why hadn't he run away with Buddy when they were in the woods together for all those years? _Why hadn't he run?_

But Ward had never been a runner. He was a fighter, whatever that meant. But nobody was giving him the opportunity to fight anymore. Even the guy who gave him his food managed to do it in total blackness, and nobody came to visit at all, no matter how much Ward yelled about Sophia Waterson.

He didn't know how long it was before he gave up. All Ward knew was that he wasn't Grant Ward anymore. He was some pathetic shadow of himself. Sure, he could probably still kill a man with his bare hands, but all he wanted to do was kill himself, if only to get out of this fucking darkness. He was still smart, he knew that, but all he thought about was what happened after death. He didn't think about ways to escape or some shit like that. This wasn't _The Shawshank Redemption_ —there was no redemption for him.

But he did give up. Ward was laying there on the cold floor one day, trying to force the headache to recede, when he decided that he didn't fucking care what happened. He was going to—he didn't know what he was going to do, he was just going to—going to—

And that was when the panel over the glass wall opened.

The light came crashing in like a tidal wave. Ward struggled to sit up immediately and squinted at the light—his eyes started watering and he covered them, trying to give them time to adjust. He wondered how pathetic he looked there on the floor—

But it was really hard for his eyes to adjust now. Ward had to close them and wait a few minutes, opening them occasionally, before he could even sort of look at whoever the visitor was. He sort of hoped it was Skye, even though that was stupid; but if it was her, she'd have shown up with all that light pouring out from around her, like some kind of demented angel.

It wasn't Skye.

"We need more names," said Phil Coulson.

Ward, who was still on the floor and trying to adjust to the idea that light still existed, that people even still existed, could not fucking believe it. "What?" said Ward, his voice hoarse from disuse.

"Names, Ward," said Coulson, who had the goddamn audacity to sound impatient.

"Names," Ward echoed back. It was weird to taste words on his tongue, to be having an actual conversation with someone, to hear someone responding. He struggled to stand and focused on Coulson, who was standing on the other side of the glass with that same expression he always wore, polite and vaguely amused. "You want names."

Coulson gave him a look. "Yes, Ward. Do I need to repeat myself?"

Ward stared at him. Then he could feel hysterical laughter starting to bubble up in his chest. "Names?" Ward said, voice rising. "You want some fucking names? Here are some names, Coulson—Sophia Waterson, Donnie Gill, John Garrett, Mike Peterson—"

"What?" said Coulson.

"And Grant Ward!" Ward finished at a yell. "How about my name, you arrogant son of a bitch! Those are all the people you've ruined with your fucking organization! You've killed them all, Coulson! Every single last one!" Ward flew at the glass, pounding on it and snarling at Coulson on the other side. "We're all dead! All of us! _Dead!_ "

"Well, you know what, Ward," said Coulson, stepping up closer to the glass to better face him, "a lot of other people are about to die too if you don't give me more names."

" _Fine!_ " Ward screamed at him, and then he gave him the names. When he had listed enough for Coulson to take a step back away from the glass, Ward said in a quiet, lethally calm voice, "What do I get for those names, Coulson?"

"Absolutely nothing," said Coulson, taking another step back.

"At least give me the light," Ward said.

He and Coulson stared at each other. Then Coulson said, "No thanks," in that stupid voice of his, and the panel slid shut.

Ward lost it. He threw himself against the glass, screaming profanity at Coulson and anyone else he could think of, and he slammed into the glass until all of him hurt and he was having a panic attack again, and then he didn't even know what he was doing anymore. All he knew was that eventually he was on the floor and he was asleep again.

The time melted away. Ward couldn't even be miserable. He went through his routines and then laid there on the floor, where he thought the rectangle of light used to be from his other cells, and wished he could feel the sun on him again.

But he wasn't going to and he knew it now. He knew it for sure. So, with this certainty, Ward slowly rose from the floor; then, once he was on his feet, he turned and made sure he knew where the glass wall was. With that information noted Ward ran straight at the iron walls.

Ward battered himself around in that cell. He threw himself at the walls until he could taste blood in his mouth and he knew there was at least one bone broken in his arm. He just kept going, though, because there were no other options anymore. He wasn't going to see the sky—he wasn't even going to see Skye, and maybe they were the same thing now, he didn't even know, because if he saw one he'd have enough hope to see the other that he'd hold on just a little while longer.

But they were both gone and he had nothing left to lose. Ward smacked his head against the wall again and again, that headache increasing horribly, until he could feel blood running down the side of his head. Then he just kept going, eyes closed, silently determined to get the hell out of this place if it was the last thing he did.

And God, he hoped it would be.


	4. d

_VAULT D_

* * *

 _You should have tried harder_.

He knew.

He knew.


End file.
